The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 22-28
Three Sisters (2012)
Directed by Wang Bing
Unceasingly, the PRC has stated that the good of the collective outweighs the concerns of the individual, that uplifting poverty is more important than civil liberties. Returning to documentary films after his first fiction work (The Ditch), Wang quietly overwhelms this official binary, simply and heartbreakingly. Three Sisters follows the play and near-constant toil of its three titular siblings—ten-year-old YingYing, six-year-old Zhenzhen, and four-year-old Fenfen—who live largely alone in rural southwest China, splitting their time between themselves, their aunt, and their frequently absent father. Untiringly humane, Three Sisters knows that poverty is crushing and that to speak only of lifting it up is an act of rhetorical and political convenience. Jeremy Polacek (June 26, 7:30pm at the Spectacle)